Cantonese (廣東話 Gwóngdūng wáh) is a widely spoken Chinese language. It is the local language in current use within the province of Guangdong in China, official language in the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau, and used in many overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, with Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) being two places where Cantonese is the dominant language in a Chinese community that is in turn huge and influential. Cantonese is also the dominant language in many Chinatowns all over the world, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Chicago, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Vancouver, and Toronto. The form of Chinese spoken by many inhabitants of eastern and southern Guangxi province in mainland China is often referred to as a form of Cantonese as well.

Chinese languages are mutually unintelligible, with difference ranging from that between Italian and French to that between German and Swedish, which we would call "related languages" rather than "dialects".

All Chinese languages, in general, use the same set of characters in reading and writing in formal settings. A Cantonese speaker and a Mandarin speaker cannot talk to each other, but either can generally read what the other writes. However, there can be significant differences when the "dialects" are written in colloquial form. For example in Cantonese as used in Hong Kong, more informal phrasings are used in everyday speech than what would be written. Thus, some extra characters are sometimes used in addition to the common characters to represent the spoken language and other colloquial words.

There are different local languages in Guangdong that are sometimes considered Cantonese dialects but in fact are separate languages, such as Taishanese, spoken in Taishan in the far west of Guangdong. However, most people throughout Guangdong know how to speak standard Cantonese (Guangzhou dialect) and Hongkongers and Macanese speak standard Cantonese with slight influences from Western languages, especially from English in Hong Kong Cantonese. The Cantonese spoken in Singapore and Malaysia also differs slightly due to Malay influences.

Virtually all younger Cantonese speakers in mainland China are able to speak Mandarin, so learning Cantonese is not necessary to communicate. However, Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong, Macau and overseas Chinese communities often do not speak Mandarin, and particularly in the former, the use of Mandarin can be a touchy political issue.

Some of the phrases in the list are difficult to translate from English to Cantonese.

The pronunciations given in this guidebook use the Yale Romanization system. Sounds can only be approximated at best. This guide gives a general indication of the correct sound to make, but the best way to be completely accurate is to listen closely to native speakers and mimic the sounds they make. Unlike in Mandarin, there is no widely-used Romanization system for Cantonese, and native speakers almost never learn those that do exist. Since most locals will have no idea how to read Romanized Cantonese, stick to Chinese characters for written communication.

Unless otherwise indicated, pronunciation between the Cantonese of Hong Kong and Macau is identical to that of Guangzhou.

Like Mandarin, Cantonese distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, not unvoiced and voiced as in English, and lacks voiced consonants. Aspirated sounds are pronounced with a distinctive puff of air as they are pronounced in English when at the beginning of a word, while unaspirated sounds are pronounced without the puff, as in English when found in clusters. However, Cantonese lacks the "tongue rolling" (pinyin zh, ch, sh, r) initial consonants that are found in Mandarin.

Yale

Pronunciation

b

p in "sport"

p

p as in "pat"

m

m as in "mom"

f

f as in "foot"

d

t in "stop"

t

t as in "top"

n

n as in "not"; in Hong Kong and Macau, initial n is often substituted with l as in "lap"

l

l as in "lap"

g

k in "sky"

k

k as in "kite"

ng

ng as in "singer"; in Hong Kong and Macau, ng by itself without a vowel is often substituted with m as in "mom" , while it is often omitted as the initial consonant of a syllable

Unlike Mandarin, Cantonese retains all the final consonants of middle (m, n, ŋ, p, t, and k) Chinese. The final consonants p, t, and k are unreleased. This means that they are virtually silent and you hear no "puff of air" at the end of the syllable.

Cantonese is a tonal language. This means that the same syllable, pronounced in a different tone, has a different meaning. To complicate this, there may be more than one character pronounced as the same syllable with the same tone. In this case, context usually helps resolve the ambiguity. This may sound daunting, but is in fact is better than say, English, where there are a great deal of words that are spoken identically (eg. their, there, they're) and have nothing but context to help determine which one it is. Cantonese has context and tone to help distinguish words.

Different variations of the Cantonese language have a different number of tones, from as few as six to as many as ten or more. Most speakers, however, and all modern linguistic interpretations get by with being able to distinguish (both in spoken and heard Cantonese) between the following six tones:

Yale

Description

Start-to-end pitch

Yale

Description

Start-to-end pitch

1

ā

High Level

4

àh

Low Falling

2

á

Mid Rising

5

áh

Low Rising

3

a

Mid Level

6

ah

Low Level

The tonal pronunciation of Cantonese is by far the most difficult aspect of the often daunting language. The very minor initial difficulty in learning the tones is sometimes more than made up for by simple grammar, and absence of almost all plurals, genders, tenses and other conjugations that make many other world languages seem difficult by comparison.

The form after the slash is used in financial contexts, such as writing cheques and printing banknotes, to prevent someone from changing the amount initially written.

0

零 leng

1

一 / 壹 yāt

2

二 / 貳 yih (兩 loeng is used before counter words)

3

三 / 參 sāam

4

四 / 肆 sei

5

五 / 伍 ńgh

6

六 / 陸 luhk

7

七 / 柒 chāt

8

八 / 捌 baat

9

九 / 玖 gáu

10

十 / 拾 sahp

11

十一 / 拾壹 sahpyāt

12

十二 / 拾貳 sahpyih

13

十三 / 拾參 sahpsāam

14

十四 / 拾肆 sahpsei

15

十五 / 拾伍 sahpńgh

16

十六 / 拾陸 sahpluhk

17

十七 / 拾柒 sahpchāt

18

十八 / 拾捌 sahpbaat

19

十九 / 拾玖 sahpgáu

20

二十 / 貳拾 yihsahp

21

二十一 / 貳拾壹 yihsahpyāt

22

二十二 / 貳拾貳 yihsahpyih

23

二十三 / 貳拾參 yihsahpsāam

30

三十 / 參拾 sāamsahp

40

四十 / 肆拾 seisahp

50

五十 / 伍拾 ńghsahp

60

六十 / 陸拾 luhksahp

70

七十 / 柒拾 chātsahp

80

八十 / 捌拾 baatsahp

90

九十 / 捌拾 gáusahp

100

一百 / 壹佰 yātbaak

200

二百 / 貳佰 yihbaak

300

三百 / 參佰 sāambaak

1000

一千 / 壹仟 yātchīn

2000

二千 / 貳仟 yihchīn

Just as in Mandarin, Cantonese numbers starting from 10,000 are also grouped in units of 4 digits starting with 萬 maahn. Therefore, "one million" would be "one hundred ten-thousands" (一百萬), and "one billion" would be "ten hundred-millions" (十億).

In Cantonese, "train" is translated into 火車 (fóchē), "metro/subway" is 地鐵 (deitit) and "bus" is 巴士 (bāsí). The language uses measure words or numeral classifiers before the actual nouns. In context of the following examples, the respective Cantonese measure words for 火車 and 地鐵 are 班 (bāan), and 巴士 is 架 (ga).